


draw a monster

by mikkey_bones



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Recovery, Red Room, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 17:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6124993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkey_bones/pseuds/mikkey_bones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Maybe somewhere there is a kind of monster who protects young girls. But she knows it will not be one of the Red Room's creations.</i>
</p><p>Or, Natasha takes some time, and a few weeks off the grid, to figure out what makes a monster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	draw a monster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moosen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moosen/gifts).



> Written to fill a request asking for a story about Natasha's past from the Red Room until now. Fits with MCU canon up until Avengers: Age of Ultron; I'm pretending Civil War doesn't/won't happen. Since this is a fic that involves, even tangentially, Natasha's childhood, warnings for _mentions_ of child abuse, death. The quote from the title/intro to this fic is by Janice Lee in her book _Daughter_. The bits about Natasha's classmates come from [this headcanon](http://emir-dynamite.tumblr.com/post/138265455084/so-its-a-popular-piece-of-fanon-that-the-winter) by tumblr user [emir-dynamite](http://emir-dynamite.tumblr.com).

Girls tell stories. Even frightened girls, girls who are too skinny and sleep with one arm raised above their heads, chained to the bedpost. Girls who live in a monstrous world tell stories of the monsters that they have not yet seen.

When she is one of these girls, they tell stories about the masked man with the metal arm. The killer who has been perfectly molded into the strong right arm of Department X. They are all told they must be like him. They make up stories at night, imagining what he is like.

There are five guards, all men. One of them likes young girls. They can see it in his eyes as he watches them file into the dormitory each night, and they can feel it in his touch when he double checks the cuffs on their wrists.

Sometimes he comes in late at night, shining his bright flashlight into their faces. They all hold their breath and pretend to be asleep, even when he touches them.

One day, he isn't there. He doesn't come to work the next day, either. Or the next. He's disappeared.

A week later she whispers a story in the dark that she doesn't believe: _it was him. He did it. Squeezed Comrade_ _Vasileivich's_ _throat with his metal hand until his eyes bulged and his tongue swelled up and he choked to death on his spit like a rabid dog_. She knows this is a lie because Department X would not waste their Soldier's time on such a frivolous task, and because she heard Madame B talking about Vasileivich's removal with another one of the guards.

Maybe somewhere there is a kind of monster who protects young girls. But she knows it will not be one of the Red Room's creations.

*

_Draw a monster.  
Why is it a monster?_

*

When they find him, he knows her.

She's being selfish. She will phrase it like this: when they find him, he knows _everyone_ , and Natasha doesn't know how he managed to get his memories back in such a short time but she also remembers her first few weeks out of the clutches of the Red Room, how things came back inch by inch, and the most important, inconsequential information first. The kinds of things that mean a lot to the person you used to be but that interrogators will laugh at, if they don't ignore it.

Like Steve's mother's name.

Like Steve's old shoes.

Like the fact that Natasha's hair used to be curly.

"It still is," she tells him, arms crossed tightly over her chest. She could try to appear casual about this but she knows he would see right through it, and so she doesn't bother. “I just spend more time working on it now.”

Steve looks between the two of them and Sam, at his side, seems grim. “Nat,” he says.

Both Natasha and James look at him, Natasha with the renewed realization that Steve has never read her file and with him, it's up to her to strip her past bare; James with the new realization that there are things about him that Steve doesn't know—things that go beyond _pain_ or _free will_ or _mindwipe_.

James turns his gaze back to her. He's got a different way of looking, now. Instead of that sharp, dangerous focus, he keeps his blue eyes wide. It's a combination of hope and confusion and fear. The fear, Natasha thinks, is because he's scared that he is remembering wrongly, that this is a test… that this is all a dream in the ice.

She knows that fear.

“I knew you,” James says.

What does it mean, that she wanted this and didn't want it at the same time? What does it mean, that she doesn't know what to do now? She keeps her eyes on Steve and Sam. “He trained me. Russia.”

“What about Katya?” James asks suddenly.

“Who?” Natasha asks.

“And Milena. Lilya and Yeva. The girls that were with you. The others that I trained.”

In Natasha's memory, she is alone. The other ballerinas, the other shooters are other too-thin, too-pale girls. Faceless. Slowly, at each familiar but long-gone name James speaks, they begin to fill out, take shape, gain flesh.

Tatanya. Eva. Yelena.

“I remember Ninel,” James continues. Why does he remember all of this? Why is he bringing back everything that Natasha thought she had forgotten? “She tried so hard. I liked her. And then she disappeared, and no one ever said...”

Natasha remembers Ninel too, now. She had straight black hair and a round face and once she fainted on the training mat, even though she was one of the best fighters, because she'd stopped herself from eating so she could get skinny like the rest of them. “She was unfit,” Natasha says and hates herself for it even as the words leave her mouth. “You know that.”

“The rest of the girls,” James says.

The rest of the girls, shadows in her dreams, now coming back to haunt her. She killed Marina herself. Orders. She had to.

(Was she ordered? Did she have to?)

“I am the Black Widow,” Natasha says. The title feels like venom in her mouth. James looks infinitely sad. What right does he have, to bring everything back like this? They found him. Steve has his best friend back. Natalia has her… someone she used to know. A trainer. A tentative friend.

All the girls, she realizes now, thought of him as a friend. Mentor. Guide. As much of that as they ever had, in the Room.

All of the girls thought.

All of the girls _fought_.

Natasha realizes that in spite of herself, she has spent a very long time thinking she was better, that she was _chosen_ , that her title was more than an accident of fate and physiology.

James still hasn't said anything. Natasha turns and walks away before he can see anything in her face.

*

There's a question that's been hovering in Natasha's mind since everything happened with Ultron, and from even before then. Since Pierce looked her in the eye and reminded her that by releasing SHIELD's files, she would be releasing everything about her past as well. The question is this: are monsters made, or are they born? And the corollary: can monsters be unmade, or must they be killed?

In simpler terms: _why me?_ And, _what now?_

*

> From: [ADDRESS UNKNOWN]  
>  To: cbarton@hotmail.com  
>  RE: Vacation
> 
> Leaving for a few weeks. Taking care of some business. I'll be out of touch. You know how to find me if you really need me. Otherwise, don't try.
> 
> Send my best to Laura & kids. <3 Don't let Steve worry too much.
> 
> NR

*

There isn't much going on in Yekaterinburg. Not that there ever is, Natasha thinks, but maybe that's how you always have to think about the place where you were born.

She walks the streets like in a dream. Here is the place she was born. The tall, vaguely pink-colored blocks of Soviet-era public housing tower high above her. This was her family's building. They repainted it after the fire, but the paint around the fifth and sixth floors is slightly different from the rest.

She stands on the exact spot on the sidewalk where, she imagines, Ivan caught her when she was a baby. She's never done that before. Too sentimental. But sentiment, she's realizing, hurts worse and lasts longer when you try to ignore it. Kind of like a broken bone.

She doesn't visit the cemetery, though. Even if she wanted to, she doesn't know where her family would be buried.

Speaking of family…

On her third day in the city, Natasha finds an old friend. Sergei still has his mechanic's shop, which he is still running very much as a front for all kinds of illegal, black market operations. They haven't seen each other in at least twenty years now, but she's kept tabs on her old network, and she knows it's the same with him. When she walks in, he doesn't even look surprised to see her.

“I was wondering when you would show up,” he says, standing up behind his counter. His voice is friendly, but Natasha isn't fooled; his left hand is out of sight and she knows that he's holding a gun. “I've been seeing you a lot on the television.”

“I'm not here to give you any trouble,” she says, keeping her hands at her sides and facing him fearlessly. “I just have a question.”

Sergei looks mistrustful; very slowly, Natasha slips a hand into her pocket and pulls out a bundle of 1000 ruble bills, holding it between her index and middle finger, high enough that Sergei can see exactly what she's offering.

Sergei finally pulls the Makarov pistol out from under the counter, but only to gesture to a worktable next to her. “Put it down there. What's the question?”

Natasha does as he says. “I want to know what happened to the Red Room.” She was taken away when she 'graduated'; after that, she never learned what happened to it. Her handlers had never informed her, Natasha had never thought to ask, and then… She forgot? Was made to forget? She just knows the question had never occurred to her with any sort of actuality until Wanda had gotten into her mind.

Sergei hesitates a moment, clearly debating whether he should play dumb. Natasha can see it in his face. She's glad, for both of their sakes, when he decides not to bother with the act. “I don't think I should give you that kind of information.”

Natasha reaches into her pocket once more, pulls out another bundle of money, and places it on top of the first. “I'm not going to bargain with you, Sergei,” she says. She doesn't have time to play around and they both know that in a fight, she'd win.

“Lyubertsy,” Sergei says. “If there's anything left, it'll be there.”

Natasha meets his eyes. Sergei looks back at her. “I know the consequence of lying to you, and I am not foolish enough to think that you would not escape from any trap that I could set for you.”

Natasha looks at him for another moment, then nods decisively. “See you later, then.”

“I hope not,” she hears Sergei say as she turns and leaves the shop.

*

Sergei didn't give her much to go on. But he gave her enough. Once she arrives in Lyubertsy, Natasha knows what to look for and who to ask for it.

The building she locates as the old KGB building in the area has since been bulldozed. The government hospital next door survived the demolition, though, along with its extensive basement system.

Natasha gets inside on the pretense that she's visiting her ailing husband, wearing a dark wig and a long black coat. In the corridor, she slips through a maintenance door, and then it doesn't take long until she's in the bowels of the building.

She sheds the coat and wig and stuffs them in an air duct; she doesn't need them for the moment. Underneath, she's suited up, ready for whatever she might find.

At the same time, though, she doesn't know what to expect. She doesn't encounter anyone as she winds her way through the basement corridors, nor when she picks the lock on a door that looks like it hasn't been touched in years. It opens with a shower of rust flakes. Looking around carefully, Natasha steps through.

The dusty corridor leads to another door, this time stainless steel, reinforced, locked with a keypad. Natasha is uncomfortably reminded of the first HYDRA base she infiltrated with Steve.

Hopefully there are no missiles trained at this one.

But as Natasha figures out the code and the door slides aside, it becomes clear that this facility, though ostensibly more modern-seeming than even the hospital above it, is long abandoned. And there's no malevolent A.I. programs that boot up when she turns on the lights, as far as she can tell.

She pads silently down the cement corridor, past a line of closed doors. Natasha looks into the doubly reinforced plexiglass windows set into each of them. They're empty. She passes another, larger room, lined with two rows of small metal bed frames, and she knows that she's in exactly the right place.

But there's nothing here. Not even the sign of a struggle. Natasha supposes now, for the first time, that maybe the Red Room died like so many other horrible things: lack of interest, lack of funding. That no one fought, but Madame B and Dr. Rodchenko slowly ran out of money and staff.

She's not sure how she feels about that, because she's slowly realizing why she came here in the first place—because she wants to face the girl she was, face the people who made her who she is now. And she wanted to burn it all down.

There's nothing to burn. The files are empty. The computer drives have been wiped. The Red Room, as far as Natasha can tell, has disappeared.

*

She has an apartment in Moscow, one that she bought with her own funds just as the housing bubble broke. Cheap. Fully furnished. Safe.

After a few minutes, she's settled in and is brewing tea with a teabag from one of the carefully sealed tins in her cupboard. She thinks about emailing Clint, but doesn't know what to say.

She receives a message instead:

> From: [ADDRESS UNKNOWN]  
>  To: nromanoff@mac.com
> 
> I know you want answers. It took you long enough. Meet me in Paris on Tuesday. The overpriced café in the Luxembourg Gardens, 1100 hours. Your only chance.
> 
> Y

*

Natasha has never been able to decide whether she likes Paris or not. It's certainly not one of her favorite cities. Too wrapped up in itself. Too… romantic, and sometimes that makes her a little uncomfortable.

Too much government activity, too. It's a pain to ever get a job done here.

Is this a job if she's doing it only for herself?

*

It's spring. When she gets to the gardens, flowerbeds are bursting with pink and purple flowers. As she steps through the gates Natasha feels the pollen go straight to her nose. She heads to the cafe, scanning the outdoor seating. There are several people there, mostly couples. Two single ones: an older man with graying hair and a hard set to his face, reading a newspaper; a blonde woman younger than Natasha, wrapped up in a large beige coat, smoking a cigarette. She doesn't recognize either of them and she's about to move towards the older man when the blonde woman catches her eye and beckons.

Interesting.

As she approaches the woman stands up to shake her hand. It's such an American gesture that Natasha is a little taken aback when she starts in Russian right away. “Widow. It's interesting to finally meet you. I've heard a lot.”

Natasha is not particularly impressed. She gets this kind of grandstanding all the time, especially after becoming an Avenger. Especially after putting all her files on the internet for anyone to read. “And you are?” she asks.

“Yelena Belova,” the woman answers and looks at Natasha expectantly, like that name is supposed to ring a bell. It doesn't, and that's obvious on Natasha's face, and after a beat Yelena's mouth twists slightly in apparent annoyance. “I am the last graduate of the program.”

The— _oh_. Natasha looks at her with new eyes, and Yelena sees that, and looks pleased. “I was part of the new generation. After they moved to Lyubertsy. They were always telling stories about you. They measured us all against your potential.”

Natasha spent so much of her childhood trying so hard for success that Yelena's words are almost gratifying, and she shoves that feeling as far away as she can. “How many were you?” There were twelve beds.

“Nine, when I was there,” Yelena says. “Some of the weaker ones died in training, but for those who could not complete the final tests, other employment was offered.” She shrugs, and in the casual indifference of her voice Natasha feels an echo of herself, who she used to be, who she doesn't want to be anymore, and hates it. “I heard it was different in your day.”

“Either way, girls were tortured and left to die,” Natasha snaps.

The waiter comes up. Yelena orders espressos for them both in flawless French. The conversation resumes, skirting around what Natasha just said. “I thought I would meet you sooner,” Yelena tells her. “The way they talked about you—they didn't tell me you were a traitor until after I graduated. My dream was to be assigned to hunt you down and kill you.”

Natasha watches her in silence, but she's now on high alert, ready for Yelena to spring some kind of trap.

Nothing happens. Yelena keeps talking. “I thought I would meet you eventually. We are in similar lines of work. I thought,” and here she leans forward, the lines of her face slightly harder, “that you would come back.”

Come back to work for Russia again? Or come back to the Room, come back to the girls, for better or for worse? Natasha remembers the kinds of stories she and her classmates told about the Soldier. She wonders what kind of stories Yelena and her classmates told about her.

She wonders if they imagined she would protect them. It's not a question she will ever ask.

“I never came back,” she acknowledged. “I never thought—my memory. Dr. Rodchenko—did he…?”

Yelena's expression is still hard. “I know no one by that name.”

 _Good_ , Natasha thinks with a vicious satisfaction that surprises her. She hopes he's dead. She hopes he was killed. The Department always cleaned up its messes.

“He experimented with memory wiping and replacement techniques,” Natasha says as bluntly as possible, because she knows that Yelena, as a fellow graduate, doesn't need anything sugar-coated or made more palatable for her understanding.

“That wasn't in your file,” Yelena replies.

Natasha looks away, watching the waiter return with their coffees. “There is a lot that isn't in my file. How old are you?”

“How old are you?” Yelena counters. Neither of them are as young as they look.

Natasha turns back to meet her eyes, matching her closed expression with a flinty grin. “That wasn't in my file?”

Yelena nods, acknowledgment of a point scored, and takes a sip of her coffee, black, no sugar. Natasha unwraps one of the little sugar cubes and drops it into her own coffee cup, stirring it. “What happened to the Room?”

“The organization is gone,” Yelena says, and then gives Natasha an icy smile, one that echoes the smile Natasha gave her earlier. “It is disappeared.”

The Red Room—disappeared, like that guard Vasileivich disappeared, like Natasha's classmates disappeared, like Ivan disappeared. Poetic justice. “On whose orders?”

“FSB. Regime change.” Yelena pauses, glances around the mostly empty tables at the cafe. “I led the team that carried out the orders. We killed the last few technicians, burned the papers, destroyed the equipment.”

“And the girls?” Natasha asks with a pang that she feels deep in her chest.

“I was the last,” Yelena says, and in the proud look in her eyes, the firm set of her jaw, Natasha thinks that she sees herself. But maybe that's simply narcissism. Or the feeling—new to her—of having someone to whom she's almost related. A family of sorts. Bound by spilled blood. “They knew it was over. That's the problem. Some got away, and I'm trying to complete my assignment. Technically, it was accomplished, but… we were taught not to leave loose ends.”

Natasha looks at Yelena and nods. “Who's left?”

Yelena meets her eyes. “Madame B.”

There's a weird thrill, to hear that name spoken aloud again. It's voicing her past. It's putting a name and a face onto her confusion about what happened then and what happens next. “Madame B,” she repeats.

“I've been watching the old Room location since we shut it down. That's how I got a few of them. And,” Yelena adds, tossing back the rest of her espresso, “I thought, once you'd heard it was over, you'd come too. And you did. Just… many years later than I expected.”

Her voice has a bitter note to it. Natasha finishes her coffee as well. The sweetness of the sugar cube helps. “But I came. And you contacted me anyway,” she says. This whole time, Yelena has been leading up to an offer; Natasha wants her to get it out, already.

Yelena looks at Natasha, then down at her empty coffee cup, then across the tables once more, before focusing back with her steely gray gaze. “Madame B is in Paris. I want to finish this tonight.”

*

As Yelena explains it, Madame B is _old_ now, and walks with a cane, and lives with a small dog on the third floor of an apartment building in the Saint-Germain neighborhood. She gets groceries every Sunday and, every other day, goes to the cafe by her home to have a coffee and read the morning paper. She watches game shows. She cooks all her meals from scratch and sometimes she cooks for her dog too. She doesn't have an internet connection and she doesn't talk to anyone on the telephone. She doesn't have anyone to talk to.

Natasha remembers Madame B as they knew her, back straight, hair always tied back into a severe bun, always ready with a harsh word and rarely with a kind one. She's seen her execute girls with a pistol to the back of their head.

And now she has white hair and slippers and a dog. It's hard to imagine her being gentle. It's hard to imagine her being anything other than what she was.

*

Working with another Red Room graduate is strange. An entirely new experience. It reminds Natasha of training exercises with her classmates; there's definitely an element of competition between her and Yelena, even moreso because they've both graduated.

But at the same time, they've done all the same drills, they've learned all the same strategies; though Yelena tends to be a bit more direct (at the expense of stealth) and Natasha prefers assuming a cover to sneaking around air ducts… they figure out a way to work together.

The plan is simple: they cut the telephone line, they cut the power, they walk in. Natasha comes in through the front door; Yelena gets in through the service doors in the back. Madame B doesn't have anything beyond the most rudimentary alarm system. It will be enough.

Natasha isn't sure what to expect that they'll find. She isn't surprised, though, when she walks in, gun drawn and held close to her chest, to find Madame B simply sitting in her armchair in her living room, the dog on her lap. Yelena is already there, standing on the opposite side of the room at the kitchen door, but Madame B appears unmoved.

She only registers some surprise when she sees Natasha's face. “Natalia,” she says. “I wasn't expecting _you_. Or rather, I thought you would have finished this job sooner.”

Natasha lowers her gun. “I didn't know this job was still out here,” she admits. The sitting room is filled with all kind of slightly tacky, antique store bric-a-brac. Porcelain, lace, rosewood furniture, kitschy stuff. Like where any other grandmother would live. “I'd assumed you'd be dead by now.”

Madame B laughs. It's a slightly raspy, thoroughly unhumorous sound. “As if you were the only one who benefited from what the Red Room had to offer,” she says. “So what do we do now? Will you kill me and leave, as you have done to the others? Or shall we talk?”

You told us not to let our targets bargain,” Yelena says, her voice flat and harsh. “It is simply a method to buy for time. Death is inevitable.”

Madame B scratches her dog behind the ears. “So it is.”

Yelena looks like she is ready to end things there, but Natasha still has questions. Because just like she saw her younger self in Yelena, she thinks that she can see an echo of herself in Madame B, too. An echo of who she could become, if she isn't careful. “Why did you do it?” she asks.

Madame B finally looks her in the eyes, fixes her with a dark gaze that's just as piercing as it was years and years ago. “Do what?”

Natasha stares her down in stony silence. She knows what.

It works. After a few moments, Madame B looks away. “We were given the opportunity to create something great. Something that would bring us greatness.”

“The motherland?” Natasha asks skeptically.

“The Room,” Madame B corrects her, and it's that same slightly scolding tone that Natasha remembers from when she was a child. “And women—I proposed the project. I did it to bring out the true strength of women. To create the perfect female fighter.”

“You killed children.”

“Many people kill children,” Madame B says. “ _You_ have killed children.”

Natasha says nothing, but her mouth thins into a hard line. She was acting under orders, under torture, under mind manipulation. Madame B was acting with her own free will, her choice, doing what she thought was right. There must be a difference. There _has_ to be a difference, somewhere, though they are both guilty of similar crimes.

“You killed Marina,” Yelena says. Natasha doesn't know who Marina is. But she can tell there is a dark, painful story there, and she is not going to ask.

“Marina was unfit, my child,” Madame B says, turning her cold gaze onto Yelena. “You and I both know that.”

Yelena lifts her gun. “I will shoot you from the front, not the back, like you shot her,” she says. There is implacable steel in her voice.

Madame B turns to Natasha. “You are trying to atone for the sins of your past,” she says. “Will you allow this to happen?”

Making up for her past is not the same as never killing again. Natasha knows herself well enough to know that if she was not born a killer, she was certainly raised to be one, and she is slowly starting to learn that being a killer isn't the same thing as being a _monster_. There are many people who deserve what is coming to them. “It isn't my decision to make,” she says.

“Leave a little food and water for my dog,” Madame B says, lifting it up from her lap and placing it down on the floor. The dog, some sort of silky-haired terrier, goes to sniff Natasha's boots curiously.

She doesn't pay attention to it. She's watching Yelena, who is watching Madame B straighten up slowly, like it hurts her back, and look her in the eyes. “I'm ready,” she says.

Yelena fires.

*

In silence, they fill the dog's water bowl and leave it a heap of food. Then they walk out. Natasha leaves the door unlocked behind her.

Their rendezvous point is the garden next to Notre Dame cathedral. When Natasha arrives Yelena is already there, seated on a bench, smoking a cigarette. She sits next to her. “Now what?”

“Nothing,” Yelena says. “She was the last.” She exhales a stream of smoke and turns to look at Natasha. “The Red Room is gone.”

“We're still here,” Natasha points out. Are there really only two of them left? She doesn't know whether that's better or worse than thinking that she was the only one.

Yelena shrugs one shoulder. “We are not the room. I am no longer even with the FSB. Now, I can even take the jobs I want.” She laughs. It's bitter.

“What kind of jobs do you want?” Natasha asks, and wonders how much time Yelena has had to learn how to want things. Because it takes time. It took Natasha time.

“A great deal,” Yelena replies with a thin smile. “I am not as moral as you are. I will find a way to be.” Natasha watches in silence. Yelena stubs out her cigarette and stands. “I will not be like her. Goodbye, Widow.”

Natasha stays seated, offers Yelena a nod. “Goodbye, Widow.”

*

Maybe one day Yelena will feel guilty about her decision to pull the trigger. It's just as likely, though, that she won't. Monsters aren't born, they're made. Some are made by other people. Some make themselves. That, Natasha thinks, might be the difference. That's how you know when to pull the trigger, and when not to.

Dealing with the red in her ledger isn't about forgiving everything, all the time. It's about knowing when to kill, and when not to, and acting on that difference. She will always be a killer. But it's up to her, now, to decide what kind.

She wants to be the kind of killer who protects people.

She wants to be the kind of killer who makes the world safe, so another young girl doesn't have to grow up like her. So that there are no more Widows.

It's too late, but it's a start.

*

Natasha gets back exactly ten days after she left, finally turns on her real phone to find a few laconic messages from Clint (lots of baby pictures) and several worried ones from Steve. Another from Sam. Two from Maria Hill. It surprises her, how nice they are to read. She replies to them all, more or less.

Her and Steve go to breakfast once she has time to recover from her jet lag. They talk over coffee and bagels with lox and cream cheese. Natasha gives him a very basic, cleaned-up version of where she went and why. She leaves out the bit about meeting Yelena. No one here needs to know about the existence of a second Widow yet.

Steve, for his part, talks about James's progress in therapy, in running, in movie-watching—in everything, really, and he's simultaneously like a proud parent and a kid who's extremely in awe of his older brother and Natasha isn't going to analyze that one very far.

“You should visit him,” Steve suggests near the end of their breakfast, and Natasha knows he's purposefully waited until she only has a few bites of bagel left. He's giving her an out, if she needs it. “He's asked about you a couple times, you know, especially after you left.”

Natasha gives an unenthusiastic hum in response, around her last bite of bagel.

“You're important to him too, you know,” Steve points out.

“Not as much as you,” Natasha retorts. She wants to make it sound like a fact but it ends up coming out like she's jealous. She's not. Both of them met James in different ways. Steve will never know what it was like to be with the _Soldier_ , to be trained by a ghost. (Steve, in all fairness, probably doesn't want to know.)

To his credit, Steve doesn't take the bait. “Important's important,” he says with a shrug and that good-natured smile, as if he's not trying to trick Natasha into becoming part of the 'Bucky Barnes Recovery Team', and… it works. She goes back with him to his place, where James is staying provisionally, because he can't be on his own and nobody wants him in custody of the U.S. government.

James is awake and out of his room, sitting at Steve's IKEA breakfast bar with a cup of coffee. He's kept his hair long and he's tied it back, and he's wearing a sinfully comfortable looking hoodie. Natasha, who decided to actually make an effort to look nice today, envies him.

He looks up when they come in. “Hi, Steve. Natalia.”

Steve excuses himself; Natasha stays. “Hi.”

They look at each other for a few seconds in silence that isn't awkward, not exactly, but sure as hell isn't comfortable either. Natasha uses the opportunity to look James up and down, assessing. He looks different from the Soldier, obviously, but he's also different from how he looked two, three months ago, when she saw him for the first time. The haunted look in his eyes has subsided somewhat, and his shoulders aren't as tense. He has fewer sharp edges—or he hides them better.

“You're looking well,” she says after a few minutes.

“So are you,” James replies. He's submitted to her examination without complaint; as she goes to the cupboards to get herself a glass of water she can feel him assessing her with the same evaluating gaze that she'd turned on him. “Older, actually.”

Natasha glances sidelong at him. “You should never tell a lady she's old, you know. Not polite.”

“What if I mean it as a compliment?” James counters. “You're not a kid anymore, Natalia.”

“And you're not—” Natasha begins automatically and turns back to face him, glass in hand. “You're different from what I remember, too.”

“I'd like to think that's a good thing,” James says, his voice carefully neutral.

Natasha takes a sip of her drink. “Me, too.”

There's a long silence. When it becomes clear they've run out of marginally safe topics for small talk, James says, “It upset you when I asked about the other girls.” His eyes search Natasha's face. “You left. I'm sorry.”

“It did upset me,” Natasha acknowledges. “But I'd been… It wasn't just you. It was a lot of things. I needed to go.”

James looks at her for a few more seconds but appears to accept her explanation. He nods, looks away to take a sip from his coffee mug, and then fixes his gaze back on her. “You find what you wanted?”

“Yeah,” Natasha says, leaning her elbow on the counter and grinning at him. “Took off, got rid of some old ghosts. It helps.” Like her, James isn't someone who can get by with just running and movies and support groups and therapy. They were both brought up in blood, and both taught not to leave loose ends. “You should try it sometime.”

James grins back at her, sharp, wolfish. “I plan to.”

**Author's Note:**

> _fin._


End file.
